The course investigates what is clearly one of the most disturbing and inexplicable occurrences in human history. Unlike the Holocaust, to which the witch hunts are frequently compared, the persecution of witches cannot be viewed as a relatively brief and unusually violent historical anomaly, since it continued over several hundred years; they cannot be explained in the context of national specificity since they spanned almost the entire European continent and migrated to early America; nor can these events be blamed on any single "madman". As such then, witch persecution defies simplistic explanations and thus lends itself particularly well to the kinds of investigation this course intends.

Students will

1. critically engage, in discussions and in writing, four issues that can be seen as central to a Humanities course, particularly one at Georgetown University:
o interdisciplinarity (history, literature, film)
o contextualization in history
o Catholic/Jesuit identity
o and the "human experience."